Speed Is Killer Offline but Saves Online

The online and offline realms couldn’t be more different from one another. Even though both are an arena for incalculable human activities, the rules of engagement differ drastically.

Offline, fast moving, fast talking, and fast gesticulating are not universally accepted as a good behavior. People grow anxious around peers who are twitchy, uncontrolled, hasty.

Online, lightning fast, responsive, and immediate is the norm.

The guys over at the Hosting Tribunal created an awesome infographic that has some informative – and also somewhat scary – statistics about the impact of web page loading speed on customer loyalty and search engine ranking.

The data is insightful and useful but the scary part stems from the fact that a single second delay in website loading time can be catastrophic.

Every additional second of loading time reduces the page viewers by 11%. In other words, if your site doesn’t load in eight seconds, practically nobody will see its content.

In fact, people are so impatient that pages that take five seconds to load see 74% abandonment rates. In other words, three-fourths of the potential visitors navigate away before having any meaningful interaction with your website.

Five seconds.

It’s not that long, isn’t it?

Things become even gloomier when you consider the fact that people are very much inclined to share negative experiences with their peers. Nearly half of all site visitors are quick to spread the word about poor browsing or shopping experience. And that’s just the beginning.

In order to understand fully how important website speed is, check carefully the detailed infographic below. Then it would be a good idea to test the responsiveness of your website with tools like GTMetrix of Google PageSpeed Insights to see where your page stands.

In case it struggles for speed, contact your web host first to see whether its technical support can provide some solutions like GZIP compression and server-side caching. If this doesn’t bring the desired results, consider hiring web developers to optimize your site further. The investment is well worth it.